Improbable Research

If, for whatever reason, you want to compile a list of medieval names, a web site called The Medieval Names Archive claims to steer you clear of unreliable sources:

People have lots of different reasons for compiling lists of names, and most of them don’t result in good sources for medieval names…. When you are faced with a name list, here are some signs that it is probably unreliable as a source of medieval names:

• No dates.
• No list of sources where the author found the names.
• The title of the list includes the word baby.
• There is a meaning given for every name.
• Languages of origin are given with unscholarly terms like Teutonic or Celtic.
• There is no variation in the spelling of names, i.e. every William is spelled the same.

Here is a list [only highlights of which appear below] of some websites that offer name lists that you should avoid if you are looking for medieval names…:

• Kate Monk’s Onomastikon
• Society of Kabalarians of Canada Baby Naming site
• Whisper Kitty’s Given Name List
• BabyCenter Baby Names
• Middle Eastern Dance Resource Guide: Names
• The Celtic Cauldron Celtic Name Compendium
• Scythian Vocabulary and Names [of which The Medieval Names Archive says: “We recommend against trusting this discussion at all. Other publications by some of the same authors have been thoroughly discredited.”]

 

Phonebooks made of paper have been going out of style, but they are still of interest to physicists. A few years ago, an episode of Mythbusters explored the strength of interleaved phone books. (Also see the sequel in Mythbusters, or maybe even try it yourself.)

First, some context, in case you are a child of the 21st century, and so perhaps have no personal experience with paper telephone books, which could be hefty. Here’s an old TV advertisement for “the yellow pages”, a telephone directory listing businesses and their telephone numbers:

Now experiments and an accompanying mathematical model have been published in Physical Review Letters by a team of physicists. Frédéric Restagno of the University of Paris-Sud and CNRS in Orsay and his colleagues measured the force needed to separate interleaved pairs of books with between 12 and 100 pages, and they developed a mathematical model based on simple geometric and mechanical ideas to explain the impressive strength of interleaved books.

Figure 1 from the article “Self-Amplification of Solid Friction in Interleaved Assemblies” by Héctor Alarcón, Thomas Salez, Christophe Poulard, Jean-Francis Bloch, Élie Raphaël, Kari Dalnoki-Veress, and Frédéric Restagno

The strength of the interleaved books arises because the book-separating force on each page is applied at a slight angle, and this increases the perpendicular force and hence the friction of each page. Restagno and colleagues also fit the data to a curve of force versus a dimensionless amplification parameter –– following the continuum-mechanics tradition of using cute names for dimensionless parameters, let’s call it the “Hercules number” –– that depends on the number of pages, the page thickness, and the size of the overlap region between the books.

Not very closely related: Another fascinating dimensionless parameter is the “Repunzel number” from research on ponytail physics, which earned the 2012 Ig Nobel Prize in Physics.

The ‘International Journal of Smart Home’ (a publication of SERSC: (Science & Engineering Research Support soCiety)

“- is intended to foster the dissemination of state-of-the-art research in the area of SHE [Smart Home Environment] including business models, security services, and novel applications associated with its utilization.”

For a sample paper, can we recommend : ‘The Analysis of the Comical Factors of ‘Olaf’ the Snowman in Frozen – Based on the Laughter Theory of Henri Bergson’ International Journal of Smart Home, Vol. 9, No. 3 (2015).

Dr Donald McRobbie, who is director and head of magnetic resonance physics at the Radiological Sciences Unit of Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, UK, is one of the few, perhaps the only, researcher(s) to have plugged an electric guitar into an MRI scanner and used the scanner as amp and speakers. Improbable has been unable to obtain further information regarding the technical methodology of the procedure, nevertheless, here are details from his website:

“Most bizarre thing done with a guitar: I am the only person to plug a guitar into an MRI scanner and use the scanner as amp and speakers. I performed the scanner song ‘Shimming’ at a scientific conference in the Honolulu Convention Centre.

(Click here to listen) May take a bit of time to load (its just over 1mb) but worth hearing.”

Also see: Playing a cello (inside an MRI scanner)

Safety note:  Don’t try this at home (if you have an MRI scanner at home) without first obtaining safety advice from an expert.

Sneezing from a full stomach, medical hazards of mustache wax,  an otorhinolaryngologist, and the international diplomacy of using porcine parts to teach surgery— these all turn up in this week’s Improbable Research podcast.

SUBSCRIBE on Play.it, iTunes, or Spotify to get a new episode every week, free.

This week, Marc Abrahams  —with dramatic readings by Melissa Franklin — tells about:

• Sneezing provoked by a full stomach. (“Autosomnal Dominant Sneezing Disorder Provoked by Fullness of the Stomach,” A.S. Teebi and Q.A. Al-Saleh, Journal of Medical Genetics, vol. 26 , 1989 , pp. 539-40.)
• Medical hazards of mustache wax. (“An Unusual Finding on Routine Dental Pan-Oral Tomography,” S. Lloyd, V.R. Talati, and J.P. Ward, British Dental Journal, vol. 176, no. 4, February 19, 1994, pp. 144-6.)
• Adventures — well, one adventure — of an otorhinolaryngologist. (“Perioral Dermatitis Secondary to the Use of a Corticosteroid Ointment as Mustache Wax,” E.K. Edwards Jr. and E.K. Edwards Sr., International Journal of Dermatology, vol. 26, no. 10, December 1987, p. 649.)
• The international diplomacy of using porcine parts to teach surgery. (“Islam, Teaching Dermatologic Surgery, and Porcine Parts,” Lawrence M. Field, Dermatologic Surgery, vol. 27, no. 6, June 2001, pp. 608-9.)

The mysterious John Schedler or the shadowy Bruce Petschek perhaps did the sound engineering this week.

The Improbable Research podcast is all about research that makes people LAUGH, then THINK — real research, about anything and everything, from everywhere —research that may be good or bad, important or trivial, valuable or worthless. CBS distributes it, on the CBS Play.it web site, and on iTunes and Spotify).